Why Connect Unstructured Content to Structured Processes and leverage critical or Big Data?

Most enterprises and government agencies today have invested in enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, analytics, business process management, and supply chain management, to support their core business. These applications have proven their value in enabling operational efficiency. They excel at managing highly structured, transaction information such as addresses, customer numbers, information about a an asset like a pump, or infrastructure hidden below ground like a gas pipeline through a community, or purchase order numbers used in business processes. 

Similarly, facing a rising flood of unstructured information – e-mail, regulations and procedures, contracts, photos, and much more – many organizations have adopted enterprise information management (EIM) applications to coordinate and control that content. EIM applications offer numerous services to help users create, collaborate on, share, store, archive, and eventually destroy this content.

The worlds of structured business processes and unstructured content are continuing to grow closer to one another. Large organizations are faced with two problems, where and how.  Where is the single source of the truth, and how do we get it to be shared across the enterprise. This can cause critical problems and stagnate the evolution of the company, especially where the push to drive digitization is accelerating. In almost every customer- or partner-facing process, extensive unstructured information is exchanged.

Looking at the problem from the content perspective, the moment it arrives or is created, its author and recipient understand its full context, and thus its importance. But soon that memory fades, and the content, stored haphazardly on desktops, shared drives, or stand-alone applications, is effectively lost to the organization. Even if an individual recollects its existence and location, there is no connection maintained between the content itself and the context of the business process that made it relevant in the first place. The lack of authoritative information relating to a business process is one of the greatest sources of legal risk facing large companies today.  For example:

An Energy or Manufacturing Company.

Energy companies like many manufacturing companies are asset intensive and highly regulated primarily for safety and environmental purposes.  The information created by an engineer, provided by a consultant, or vendor related to an asset is critical for different kinds of information requirements; documents, data and drawings for functional locations, materials, maintenance cycles, change management and so forth.  The operators require a single source of truth ensuring accurate and updated versions of the content.   This sounds simple, however multiply the complexity across every piece of rotating equipment, pumps for example, every pressure vessel, every valve, and every pipe segment and you get the idea.  Further complicate this problem with an aging workforce require knowledge management, collaboration, and seamless access to policies and procedures and the problem escalates. The solution is to bring together in-process collaboration for operations, engineering, procurement, contractors and equipment suppliers to a harmonized Master Data Governance to all perspectives of the same data yield the same truth. 

Managing assets requires organizations to be compliant with a significant number of different regulations that have very real implications to operations. Getting the right (trained, informed with the right tools, and qualified), people to interact with assets safely is clearly critical.  Having the records to prove that every action and interaction is audit-able is vital as organizations look to reduce the risk of litigation. Do they hold records of training and certification? Furthermore have the correct guidelines been made available to the individual? Was the right part used when the pump was fixed, was the procedure followed when the equipment was restarted and the structured and unstructured content captured the business value captured.